Only 20 days left to check out this cool museum and the history of the museum befor it is gone.
Museum’s closure marks a Vegas icon’s inevitable eclipse
On Oct. 17, the Liberace Museum will close its doors at 1775 E. Tropicana Ave. True, the Liberace Foundation is making brave noises about reopening elsewhere in town, closer to the action, but the gilded pharaoh’s-tomb artifacts of Wladziu Valentino Liberace (1919-87) are likelier to be coming to a non-themed museum near you, much like the baubles of King Tut, another cultural icon not known for understatement.
While Vegas without Liberace may seem oxymoronic, it’s far less unthinkable now than ever before. Like Strip mainstays who seemed invulnerable 10 years ago but now surface only intermittently in the far reaches of the ‘burbs, Liberace’s celebrity has passed its sell-by date. Too uncool to ever be Camp, too closeted for a gay icon and too shallow to be re-appreciated, Liberace and his legacy symbolized a Vegas that only no longer exists but — unlike the Rat Pack era — nobody particularly wants to resurrect.
Questionably the most famous photo of “Mr. Showmanship,” from 1956, shows him on guitar while Elvis Presley plays piano. Elvis’s blessing was to be ahead of the curve, and Liberace’s curse was to be on it. Already his record sales were beginning to decline.
Except when he was cunningly cast as a casket salesman in The Loved One (1965), Liberace’s image stubbornly resisted subversive employment. By the time of his 1979 Valentine’s Day TV special, his act seemed more apt for Halloween. The outsized candelabra, the ostrich feathers, the wigs, the sight of “Lee” tickling the ivories in a bubble bath … it was all so cringe-inducingly tacky that only the terminally unhip could profess they were laughing with Liberace, not at him.
For the generation that came of age in the ’70s, Liberace wasn’t the skeleton in your parents’ closet but that of your grandparents: every regressive, sugary Lawrence Welk Show cliché metastasized to Godzilla-like proportions. Coincidentally, 1979 was also the year Liberace founded his titular museum. It hasn’t outlived its usefulness, in part because the still-mystifying Liberace phenomenon must be seen to be disbelieved.
However, the museum seems to have outlived its constituency. Its decline also charts an inverse parallel to a rise in the number and quality of attractions on the Strip itself. Two years after Liberace’s death, Steve Wynn began pounding nails in the museum’s coffin when he opened The Mirage. As restaurants, retail and sightseeing proliferated on the Strip, the museum became a distant outpost of Vegas’s yesteryears.
Over the 31 years it’s been open, the museum’s audience has shrunk by 89 percent. At the risk of being indelicate, the Liberace fandom is dying off. When Wes Winters opened his short-lived Liberace tribute show at Planet Hollywood’s Wyrick Entertainment Complex (now under new management), it provoked orgasmic cries from audience members of a certain vintage, and the crowd had a distinctly blue-rinsed skew.
That Liberace G-spot is getting harder to hit. Foundation Chairman Jeffrey Koepp unwittingly pinpointed the inevitability of the museum’s decline and fall when he told the Review-Journal, “If you turn on XM Radio, you’re going to see a [Frank] Sinatra station, you’ll see an Elvis station. When you look at Liberace, his music is well-played [sic], interpreted by a real talent. But it isn’t kept alive the way Elvis or Sinatra’s is.”
Perhaps that’s because the Chairman of the Board and the King made their names with the best songs of their day, not “Chopsticks,” “Tico Tico” or “Three Little Fishes.” As Winters’s performances remind us, even a good melody could get smothered under so much extraneous pianistic filigree that it became the equivalent of a sequin-covered smoking jacket. Liberace’s body of work, to use the term loosely, was a gaudy form of Muzak. There is no future market in Liberace tribute bands, nor will Cirque du Soleil ever mount a Liberace-themed Vegas show — although its faux-naif antics are but a shark-jump away from low camp themselves.
So desultory had local interest in Liberace become that the Aug. 22 auction of the contents of his mansion at 4982 Shirley Street drew nary a murmur of local press coverage. Not counting a posthumously added event hall where the backyard used to be, the “mansion,” known in recent years as Las Vegas Villa, is of surprisingly un-Liberace scale — much smaller than the McMansions that dot the hills of that other Kingdom of Make-Believe, Lake Las Vegas.
Inside, the inventory ranged from the outlandish (do you need a freestanding fountain for your bathroom, perchance?) to the mundane, such as scores of cheap-looking candelabra. Were it not for a smattering of personal photos and other authentic Liberace memorabilia, the contents of the auction resembled a big-ass estate sale in Henderson.
At least the morbidly curious could roam the House That Liberace Built, from the stifling solarium to a master bedroom, surmounted by a crude replication of Michaelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.” In one corner, the mansion had clearly begun to settle, creating a widening fissure just below the bedroom’s crown molding.
Nothing could have been more symbolic of the sagging state of interest in all things Liberace. A pre-auction public viewing you’d expect to be mobbed drew a smattering of curiosity-seekers. Both mansion and museum overlords (two rival factions) pinned their hopes on a Steven Soderbergh biopic, starring Michael Douglas as Mr. Showmanship. Even if Douglas’s throat cancer hadn’t put that project into abeyance, it’s naïve to think one movie could reverse a quarter-century of dwindling fascination.
Just as the Strip has gone from being a getaway for the Hollywood crowd to what a friend called “a sleazy Disneyland” for Baby Boomers, the Liberace Museum’s demise marks the next stage in our evolution (or devolution). There’s no place for the King of Bling in the Snooki-fication of Vegas. What so recently was a titillating hangout for Mom and Dad is now the primordial soup of Wet Republic or Rehab, pustulent with fist-pumping Jersey Shore wannabes and their tattooed trollops. But let’s face it: We’re just trading in one brand of schlock for another.
